


Judas

by shcherbatskayas



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa 3: The End of 希望ヶ峰学園 | The End of Kibougamine Gakuen | End of Hope's Peak High School
Genre: Canon Divergence, Canon-Complient Hypnosis, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, M/M, Second person POV, Self-Mutilation, Suicide Attempt, This was supposed to be 500 words what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 18:29:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8633590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shcherbatskayas/pseuds/shcherbatskayas
Summary: Somehow, you live, even though you don't deserve it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I love Ruruka and I love suffering so like, here you go. This was supposed to be short but something happened.

When you fall asleep after all that’s happened, you are relieved. Yes, of course it’s much more likely that the attacker can get you if you’re unconscious and helpless and unable to fight back (not like you could fight much, anyways), but you’ve made a respectable barricade and you need the rest, you need to deal with the fact that you have more blood on your hand than you ever thought you would in your lifetime, and the best way to deal with that is to not deal with it by being unconscious. You killed the love of your life because you were scared, scared beyond all reason, but it doesn’t excuse it. You killed Kizakura, indirectly, all because you didn’t want to die yourself even though you know you deserve it, you’re awful and deserve worse than death could ever give you.

You wake up. You don’t want to wake up, but you do. For a minute, you think it’s just the end of another time period and that everything is going to continue as before and you have to go back to finding some way of stopping everyone from leaving until you see the monitor. The picture on it is so dumb but somehow so hypnotizing that the world spins around and shifts and you fall down because everything is out of focus and you squeeze your eyes shut, waiting for everything to right itself because you can’t be bothered to make sense of it.

You open your eyes and there he is, standing in front of you with half his face purple and twisted in a cruel smile that’s so unlike him and you open your mouth to say his name, to start begging for forgiveness, but he’s pointing his knife at _you_ and you close your mouth before the name leaves your lips. _Yoi, Yoi, Yoi, Yoi, Yoi, Yoi--_

He sneers down at you (he never _sneers_ and especially not at _you_. He loves you, he’s always loved you, he’s loved you for _years_ , ever since you were _children_ \--) and now the knife is at your throat. You close your eyes again because you can’t bear to look but you can still feel the chill of the blade against your skin.

“You betrayed me.” He says, his voice sounding far away. “I loved you, and you betrayed me.” You can tell that beneath the anger is a sorrow so deep and proliferating that you can’t even begin to penetrate it. Still, you have to _try_.

“Yoi, I’m sorry, but the NG code and I was so scared and--”

“Stop talking.” He cuts you off and now tears are in your eyes because this isn’t the Yoi you know, he would never cut you off, he _always_ listened to you all the way through, even when you were talking nonsense.

“You betrayed me, too.” Suddenly Seiko’s voice is there and you open your eyes to see her arms wrapped around Yoi and she peeks out from behind his shoulder like you always did when you were scared. “You left me even though I told you it wasn’t my fault. You didn’t believe me!”

“Because you lied! It was you!” You go back into defensive mode and scramble against the wall, hugging your knees to your chest.

“No it wasn’t! And you know it! And even if it was me...You deserved it. You were an awful friend.” Tears are welling up in her eyes and the knife is now gone from your neck and in his coat and Izayoi turns around and hugs her tight, the same way he always hugged you.

“She was an awful girlfriend, too. Just awful.” He tells her that and Seiko kisses him and now you’re weeping because both of them are leaving you behind, you have nothing and no one and the two people you’ve ever loved in any capacity have abandoned you for each other. Your chest hurts and you throw yourself at their feet.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Seiko, Yoi, I’m so-o-o-rry!” The vowels become elongated because you’re sobbing hysterically, sobbing like a child and they’re looking down at you and laughing as you rest your forehead against the cool leather of Sonosuke’s boats.

“We can forgive you, but you have to prove it.” Seiko tells you.

“You have to repent.” Yoi adds.

“You have to do to yourself what you did to us.”

“Worse, even.”

“It’s the only way.”

“The only way.”

“The only way.”

“The only way.”

“The only way.” The words leave your mouth and you understand exactly what they mean. You take a deep breath, tears streaming down your face and the knife drops from the monitor. Against all logic, a grin breaks your face in two. Yoi and Seiko are watching expectantly as you grab the knife, cradling it like it’s your only salvation because it is, it’s the only way to get their forgiveness and since no one’s ever loved you, not your parents or your school friends or even the people in your department, you’ll do it.

You start with your legs, slashing frantically and you can’t help but shriek because you’re cutting clear down to the bone and it _hurts_ , it hurts like nothing you’ve ever experienced but Yoi and Seiko are smiling so you’ll keep doing it. Remembering Seiko and her sugar allergy, you shove handfuls of candy into your mouth until you throw up from the sugary taste and you start slicing up your stomach and blood is everywhere but they’re forgiving you, you can see forgiveness building up in their face and the words are just about to leave their lips when something interrupts you, a harsh slap to the face that sends you reeling and someone grabbing for the knife in your hand, someone who isn’t Izayoi or Kimura. 

“What the fuck are you doing, Ando?!” An angry voice interrupts you and in the distance, Yoi and Seiko start to fade and you fight against the hand that hit you and the one that fought for the knife. You lunge for it and you manage to get it in your hands, but before you can successfully plunge it into your heart, the person bends your wrist back until you hear a snap and you screech. The pain brings you out of it and you’re crying hysterically, cradling your wrist with the broken fingers of your other hand and blood runs down from the wounds in your stomach and your legs and forms a misshapen puddle on the floor.

“The monitors.” You gasp out once you’ve returned to reality. “You have to destroy them, they make you--During the time limit, they make you see things and--dammit Sakakura, I was so close! They were going to forgive me!” You’re still weeping and you try to hit him but moving your wrist at all hurts so much that you give up halfway through. He gives you a look that is almost sympathetic and that freaks you out more than anything because you’ve hated each other for as long as you could remember.

“Well, thank god I showed up. Look, Ando, I need you to do something for me. Can you do something without fucking it up?” Sakakura’s missing his hand, you realize. The hand with the bangle.

“You cut off your own hand.” You notice, looking at the stump. “You aren’t doing enough to stop the bleeding! You need to tie that tourniquet tighter and what are you doing wandering around anyways? Didn’t Munakata kill you? I thought for sure that you were dead! He stabbed you!”

“Heat cauterized that wound. And speak for yourself on the matter of blood loss, missy.” He gestures to the scraped-up disaster that is the lower three-fourths of your body and you huff defensively.

“Give me the knife.” You demand. “I’m going to make you a better bandage. And then make me some better bandages.” You hold out the hand with the broken fingers because that one hurts less and even though he sighs, Sakakura hands you the knife but watches you like a hawk as you cut off the sleeves of his jacket and tie a tourniquet for his arm that stops the bleeding but also turns the stump an interesting shade of purple. You wrap up your legs and your stomach with ribbons from your own shirt, which now resembles a crop top more than anything. 

While you do all of this, he explains what he wants you to do. “Shut off the power for this place. It’ll get the bangles off and then you won’t have to worry anymore and we can get the hell out of here and get to a hospital. I’ll be smashing monitors if you need me, but I don’t think you’re so dumb that you can’t find the breaker room.”

“I know where it is.” You tell him, sounding more pouty than you would prefer but less so than you would’ve sounded if he asked you anything an hour ago.

“Good. I’m only asking you because you’ve lost less blood than me. Normally I’d ask Munakata, but--” A sadness crosses his face, the sadness of someone who’s been betrayed and you remember Yoi as he looked in your horrifying dream world and you nod.

“You can’t trust anyone, you know.” You tell him as you shakily stand, almost doubling over because of the pain in your legs. “People always betray you in the end.”

“Get lost, Ando. Get lost and prove me wrong.” He sneers at you and you glare at him, but you understand that despite you having killed two people, he somehow thinks that you’re trustworthy. The optimistic part of you, the part you’ve been burying since your infancy, says that it’s because he has a solid faith in humanity. The more rational part says it’s because he doesn’t have a choice. Either way, you turn and start running because you need this bangle off, you need to be able to leave this place without consequences. Tears drip down your face as you run, not just because of the pain but because if you realized this just a little earlier, you could’ve saved Yoi and Kizakura, whose blood you now have on your broken, misshapen hands.

You run like hell is chasing you and you pass Munakata, who’s making an announcement in a room with large windows and an intercom. He looks up at you and his eyes widen because you look like hell, but you scream as loud as you can, making direct eye contact with him and trying to explain with that primal sound how horrified you are with what he’s done, with what both of you have done to the people who loved you the most. He gets up and approaches you and you scream even louder, but your lips form words.

“TRAITOR!” is the word that leaves first, and you don’t know if you’re screaming at him or yourself. “Both of us! Traitors!” You say, and before he can ask for any clarification or stab you with that sword, you’re off running again, heading towards the breaker room as fast as you can. You hope your screaming has alerted Sakakura to stay away from that area, but you know him. He’ll still go running for Munakata the moment he hears something that sounds like it might be related to him. He’s just like Yoi in that regard and you can admire that in him.

As you make your way to that room, leaving a copious trail of blood behind you, you go through every reason why you did what you did. There are a thousand and one, more than you can ever hope to count, but they all come back to the irrational fear of betrayal that’s followed you for your whole life and the fact that you want Sononsuke Izayoi to die while he was still a good person, before that urge to betray for the sake of survival could ever touch him. You loved him too much to let him become like you.

It takes you nearly twenty minutes to reach the breakers with the breaks you’ve had to take in order to recover your legs. Somewhere beyond you, Munakata and Naegi are fighting and Sakakura is breaking monitors and Kyouko Kirigiri lays in a death-like trance and you pull down on the breakers, leaving the whole world dark. The bangle falls off of your wrist with a clunk and you collapse, not wanting to navigate the darkness. You’re free to leave, but Yoi and Seiko’s bodies are still here and you’re scared to venture out alone into the infinite black, so you decide your fate will be your worst fear: dying loveless and alone in the dark with no one to miss you. It’s what you deserve.

You’re on the brink of passing out when suddenly, there’s a flashlight and there’s the familiar face of Makoto Naegi, followed by Munakata and Sakakura. “Ruruka!” He exclaims and pulls you to your feet. You almost tell him to take his hands off of you, doesn’t he know that you have a fiance, but then you remember that you killed the man you wanted to marry and you’re crying again like the wimp that you are, the emotional little crybaby that could never do anything right and--

“Cut the shit.” Sakakura says, crossing his arms across his chest. “We need you to negotiate.”

When he mentions your one useful talent, you stop crying and start feeling confused. “Negotiate what? And what are you doing with Munakata?”

“Ryouta’s brainwashing people.” Naegi answers, not even bothering to let you in on exactly what kind of make up occurred and why Munakata isn’t trying to eliminate the “despair” that is Juzo Sakakura. 

“And?” You reply, going to place a hand on your hips like you normally would in this situation until you realize exactly how painful that movement is, so you stop midway through and let your arm hang back at your side.

“Get him to stop.” Munakata says, adding a hushed “Please.” You debate not doing it until you think of yourself getting brainwashed and you decide fuck it, you might as well help where you can because there’s nothing else to do but die and you still have enough blood left in you that it’ll take a while for you to bleed out. Even then, as you contemplate your corpse and know that you don’t deserve to live, you remember that Yoi, the real one and not the one made by the Monokuma monitor, would’ve wanted you to live. He would’ve wanted you to go on and do the right thing for as long as you were still breathing and you know he would’ve done it without hesitation, so you suck up your fear for now. 

“Fine.” You agree. “Where is he?”

“Wandering around the building. Don’t look at his phone. Oh, and be careful, he has soldiers on his side.” Munakata warns, picking up his sword. “Now if you’ll excuse me.” He leaves, and he doesn’t ask you about how you screeched that he was a traitor. You like to think it’s because he knows but doesn’t want to make you uncomfortable by bringing it up. More likely, you think that he knows and just doesn’t care.

You look at the other two and pout at them. You don’t want to face the soldiers alone because you can’t fight for shit, especially not as injured as you are, but neither one offers to go with you and you don’t trust either one of them enough to directly ask. With an irritated sigh, you make your way out of the breaker room, trying not to fall down. You keep one hand on the wall to balance yourself and walk around without much of a purpose until you see Ryouta in the distance.

“Mitarai!” You exclaim, planning out your approach. All you have to do is get him to eat the mind control candy, the ones that you didn’t eat in your madness, and then you can get him to stop. Until then, you need to not look at the phone and seem as helpless as possible, which isn’t very hard in your state. You run towards him and when he whips out the phone, you squeeze your eyes shut and stop where you are, not having to fake the terror on your face. You two are right outside the broadcasting room and he’s staring at you and you know it, even though your eyes are closed. “Mitarai, put down the phone, yeah? Let’s talk for a few minutes.”

“N-no, I have to...Ruruka, I have to do this.” He says, and you don’t open your eyes because you know he’s still holding the phone.

“Maybe you do, but why don’t we talk about it first? Let’s have something to eat and we’ll think about it, yeah? I’ll fix up my bandages and you can explain everything to me and I promise I’ll go along if it all makes sense. I promise!” You’re lying through your teeth, but you don’t think he can tell. You’re a good liar when corpses aren’t involved.

“I can’t.” He says, and you sigh and if you could open your eyes, you would tear up a bit to add to the desperation but instead you screw up your face and look as worn-down as possible.

“Ryouta, _please_. Just explain it to me!” You beg, looking in what you think is his direction but is actually a wall.

“Okay. Okay. Just open your eyes, you can do that now.” You don’t trust him, so you tilt your head towards the floor and open your eyes and you see that little bastard is still holding up the phone and if you had been dumb enough to trust him, you would’ve been brainwashed just like the rest of the army behind him.

You don’t even think, you just run towards him. You are without a single weapon, but the soldiers deck you anyways and hold you back and you trash around with your eyes squeezed shut and struggle as much as you can until you exhaust yourself and everything hurts so much that you go limp in their grip and you hear Ryouta tell them to let go of you. You fall to your knees and hold out a hand, unsure if you’re going to drag him down or if he’s going to pull you up. He grabs your hand, the one attached to a broken wrist, and he lifts you up. Your hand with the broken fingers is in your pocket and you pull out two pieces of candy. You can tell by the shape of them which one is the mind control one and which one is the normal one, and you hold out that hand to him as well.

“Take one. Have something to eat, I’m sure you must be hungry.” You smile in his direction. “And then we can talk and I can actually open my eyes, yeah?”

“I’m not hungry.” He says, and you try to look offended but you’re so tired that you don’t care if he takes them or not, you just need to keep stalling him until Juzo or Munakata or somebody who can fight shows up and takes him out. You try every trick in the book to get him to stop, pleading and threatening and rationalizing and not one of them works. Nothing can get through to him, at least nothing from your mouth. No matter how many tales you spin and sugary-sweet promises you make and dead friends you bring up who would be disappointed, he is unshakable in his resolve to brainwash the whole world. When you hear him start to walk away, you lunge forward and cling to him, resolving not to let go until he swears to listen to you again and you know that you’ll get through to him now, that one more thing should do it, but he shoves you off and all you end up doing is getting blood on his suit.

Your eyes are still closed when he activates the countdown. You don’t even know he does it, not until he sits next to you. “It’s over.” Ryouta tells you. “It’ll be out to the world in a half an hour.”

“I hate you.” You say, even though it’s not true. You know who you hate. “You’re the worst kind of coward in the world.”

“I know.” He says simply, and you want to cry because he either doesn’t get it or he knows and has accepted that he can’t change.

As the countdown continues, you begin to think of all of the things you could’ve been, the better person you could’ve become and only now that the choice has been taken from you do you realize that maybe you could do something, that maybe there’s a life after this game that could be worth living. With all of the energy of what could have been surging inside of you, you could feed the entire earth and create a future better than brainwashing and right every wrong and fix every error you’ve ever made. You could make beautiful pastries with nothing but sugar and water and you could teach others your craft. You could open a school, open a farm, open a thousand of each, make clothes for everyone on earth and wipe away the tears of ever mourning lover. You could bring Yoi and Seiko back from the dead with how much you could have been, and you try to explain to Ryouta exactly what he’s taking away just by brainwashing you, let alone what he must be taking by brainwashing everyone, you open your mouth to tell him, but then the Remnants of Despair arrive and you shut your mouth. They do all the negotiating for you. Not one of them addresses you, mostly because you turn your back to them. They’re here for Ryouta. None of them are here for you. Distantly, you wonder if maybe you’ve gained the power of invisibility because they don’t even seem to notice the copious amount of blood that you’re losing.

It takes centuries, it takes talk from all sides to do what you’ve been trying at, but eventually, they manage and with seconds left on the countdown, he shuts it off. You let out a sigh that you didn’t even know you were holding in and you realize that you now have a chance, you have a chance to do all of the things you thought of when you thought it was over for you. You can repent, you can earn their forgiveness, but this time it won’t be by killing yourself. You’ll make the world a beautiful place in their honor, a cruel word will never leave your lips again, you’ll master the art of sugar-free candy that you could never get the hang of before, you’ll do all of that and then some and somebody somewhere will forgive you. Somebody will hold you close and tell you that you’ve done well. Somebody will be proud of you. 

You start to walk away from Ryouta and the Remnants. You have nothing to say to them. They can earn their forgiveness somewhere far away, far away from the utopia you’ll create on your own. You don’t give a damn, you don’t need anyone’s help, you’ve never been on your own but you’ll be fine. You have plenty of ghosts to keep you company. You don’t need anyone, not anymore. You’ll be fine on your own.

You walk out of the hell building and into the sunlight. You start to cry because you made it out and so many people didn’t, so many people who had always been good, but you wipe your eyes with your unbroken wrist and start walking towards a hospital. You realize that you might actually need other people, at least for medical attention because you can’t fix the physical damage that you did to yourself.

A motherly-looking woman stops when she sees you, stops dead in her tracks and calls out to other Future Foundation soldiers, who look at you with widened eyes. They’re you’re subordinates and you recognize a few youthful faces from the little group that you had within the Future Foundation, the ones who would follow you and Izayoi to the ends of the Earth.

“He’s dead.” You tell one of them, and he nods in understanding and helps you into the helicopter. In the helicopter with you is Juzo, who sustained even more injuries during all of the fighting, and Munakata who was talking to Togami in a serious tone. One of the lackeys tell you that you’ll be at the hospital in five minutes, that there’s a long line of people but that you three are urgent enough cases that you’ll probably be admitted soon.

You sit by yourself, shaking your head at members of your entourage when they flock towards you. You need to learn how to be alone before you can face any of them again. Right now, you can’t put the whole world back together, but you can start with the bloodied and bruised mess that is yourself. Even then, it’s a mystery where to begin. 

You finally decide to start with your socks. Your mad slashing with the knife left a few gaping holes in them and now they droop down at weird angles. Blood from your cuts dripped down, staining them red and made it clear into your boots, pooling around your ankles and feet. You remove your shoes with painstaking slowness, trying not to hurt your hands any more than necessary. Blood pours out of them when you take them off, but you’ll worry about that later. Next, you take off your socks, leaving yourself barefoot with all of your wounds out in the open. You pull off some strips of your shirt that remain and hide the stomach wounds and you’re pulling off the last one when the helicopter lands. You’re ushered off of the helicopter and your legs are shaking, so one of the soldiers picks you up and carries you. No one else has carried you but Yoi, but you have no energy left to cry. Juzo gets a room immediately, and you can understand why when you get a closer look at his wounds. You get a gurney and rushed into surgery a minute later, so you assume you don’t look much better. The doctor’s masks remind you of Seiko and the perpetual mask across her face and the last thing you think of before the anesthesia takes you under is a day in middle school where you copied Seiko’s notes for a class you didn’t pay attention to while she talked about the specifics of some odd medicine. You didn’t understand what she was talking about, but you liked the excited tone of her voice as Izayoi rested his head in your lap and smiled as you jokingly threatened to use him as your desk.

The days in the hospital are a blur of bandages and medications and people. The girl who’s your second-in-command is barely a teen, a student of yours who has a passion for organization and speaks in an odd accent that sounds like a mix between French and Russian that you only understood after knowing her for a year. Despite the fact that she should love that you’re out of commission so that she can keep being in charge, she sends you more flowers than anyone. Juzo occupies the bed next to you and he spends most of his time messing with his new robotic hand and seeing which things he can punch without breaking it. 

Eventually, they release you back into the world and you return to your job. There’s food to get to the hungry and food to make for people away from farms and and food for you to cook for yourself. You work with a new zeal and soon enough, your department is the most productive in the Future Foundation. You improve, slow but steady. You improve even faster after you take Kyouko’s suggestion and invest in a therapist, who gives you a list of diagnoses as long as your forearm. You don’t wear bracelets anymore, you stop making your mind-control candies, you wear leggings always and sometimes you find yourself keeping knives and bottles in your coat just because Seiko and Yoi used to and you like to be reminded of them on the harder days. You give both of them a proper funeral and waste hundreds on buying fresh flowers for their graves every day. The world turns and you turn with it. You make friends with Juzo, even though you both pretend to hate each other. You make peace with Munakata, even if it’s an uncertain peace that you worry might break the first time you see his lips on Juzo’s because you don’t want him to get redemption, not when you can’t. But you deal with it. You go on, you keep the memories of your dead friends close, and you know more friends will die eventually, but that’s alright. You’ve made peace with the tides of life, the coming and going of friends and success, but you are not at its mercy.


End file.
